She Came From Soho

This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by
subscribing now.

This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by
subscribing now.

Talk story about artist Cindy Sherman. The forty-two-year-old New York-based artist Cindy Sherman, who has won any number of awards and honors for her photographs, tells lies. During her twenty-year career as a professional illusionist intent on recording the subtle and not so subtle transformations that she has undergone in her photographs--most of which depict Sherman in disguise--she has worked pretty much alone. Until now. "It's not really natural for me to work this way," she remarked one recent afternoon about her latest role: film director. Her first feature, tentatively titled "Office Killer," stars, among others, Carol Kane and the Fassbinder alumna Barbara Sukowa, and began shooting in Manhattan three weeks ago. As Sherman sat in her SoHo loft...she said, "I'm anxious enough about directing this movie. It would make me more anxious if I was in it."... With her justly renowned "Untitled Film Stills" of the late seventies, the viewer was confronted by Sherman as she imagined herself to be: in grainy black-and-white B-movies with many subplots... It was the dramatic surface of some of Sherman's recent photographs--in which she transforms herself into ghouls and gnomes crouched and leering in creepy landscapes--that prompted the producer Christine Vachon to ask her if she'd like to direct a horror movie. At first, Sherman was wary because of her boyfriend Robert Longo's experience with "Johnny Mnemonic," the disastrous multimillion-dollar cyber-epic. "But the money people wanted to do a series of horror films for an art-house crowd, so they were willing to be experimental," Sherman said. "Office Killer," written by Elise Mac Adam and Tom Kalin...concerns a magazine copy editor who reacts to a job change by becoming a serial killer... "The good thing about horror films...is that nobody expects them to be any good."